Leonardo's Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts

In Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts the ‘Three Salvateers’—Robert Simon, Martin Kemp and Margaret Dalivalle—give a first-hand account of the discovery of the lost Renaissance masterpiece; from its purchase for $1,175 in a New Orleans auction house in 2005, to the worldwide media spectacle of its sale to a Saudi prince for $450 million in 2017. A behind-the-scenes view of the painstaking processes of identification, consultation, scientific analysis, conservation, and archival research that underpinned the attribution of the painting to Leonardo, the book presents a consideration of the place of the painting in Leonardo’s body of work. Exploring the meaning of the painting in terms of Renaissance theology, it considers the identity of its original patron or intended recipient. Unravelling networks of early modern art dealers and collectors in Europe, it traces the emerging reception of Leonardo during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was in Enlightenment Britain that the idea of Leonardo as artist–scientist took hold of the public imagination. This book examines the ‘invention’ of Leonardo through the unique prism of the Stuart courts. The documented presence of three paintings of Christ attributed to Leonardo in the vicinity of the seventeenth-century British Royal Collection is both extraordinary and perplexing. Today, Leonardo’s five-hundred-year-old Salvator has not yet disclosed its secret history.